I have the guilty pleasure of scanning the traditional media and entertainment. It’s not that any of the various personalities I come across have any intelligent thoughts of their own, witness the ramblings of Margaret Brennan, but their utterances provide a glimpse into the larger sociology of the Left.
So it was of interest that I came across former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast where he interviews Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin. Noah states:
“And that’s a really powerful thing I’ve learned in communicating with other people. When I’m in a room with anyone where we start to tie together multiple things. So, if I’m in a room with Black people, already there’s like an implicit trust because we know what certain actions, words, and vibes mean.”
I find Noah to be a poseur, and of course he has to have a podcast. But he provides us a great service by providing a gathering place, much like a watering hole on the Serengeti, where he and his ideological ilk can gather in a place of perceived safety and can be observed. So Noah extends his remarks and a little later asks Benjamin:
“Do you think that integration was the right move?”
Benjamin replies:
“No, I don’t. And I don’t think it’s actually that controversial….
“…But again, when you’re being integrated into institutions, into a culture, that’s a supremacist culture. That’s a culture that feds off of hierarchy, off of insecurity, anxiety. Why are we being integrated into that?”
Let’s take a step back.
In our history, the symbol for desegregation is the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. This involved black parents suing the Board of Education in Topeka in order to overturn the school district’s policy of racial segregation of “separate but equal.”
The Court reached an unanimous decision overturning not only a lower court decision that supported the policy of segregation, but also the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson which served as precedent for allowing racial segregation.
Brown was seen both in its time and to this day as a great triumph of the civil rights movement, and helped to propel that movement forward to greater victories in the years to come. However, that case contained a flaw that has ramifications in the present.
In order to understand the Supreme Court of 1954, one needs to understand its chief justice, Earl Warren. Warren was the governor of California in 1953 when he was nominated to the position by Eisenhower, a move the latter called “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made.”
Warren had always been a politician, holding various elected offices over the previous three decades. In many of the cases that the Warren Court decided, you can see the influence of Warren the politician: a counting of the votes, an understanding of the political ramifications both domestically and internationally of the cases involved, and a premium placed on political results as opposed to correct judicial process. It is in this light that we need to revisit Brown and the foundations of desegregation in America.
The opinion in Brown, and there was only one, was written by Warren himself and stated two important conclusions. The first was that the Court was unable to find in the Fourteenth Amendment justification for abolishing segregation in public education. However, it did find justification for abolishing it due to the psychological effects segregation caused in black children, a justification that was not based on evidence cited in the main opinion but rather in the footnotes.
So the Court did not find in Brown that racial segregation was a moral wrong, but was wrong only in the effects it caused. In other words, racial segregation was wrong based on contingent, not moral factors.
This distinction is important for two reasons. The first is that it points to how Warren’s political approach to judicial reasoning affected the Court; for Warren, a progressive politician, the ends justified the means. Brown provided Warren and the Court an excellent opportunity to unravel segregation. Warren, understanding the political resistance that it would generate in the South, was willing to stretch reasoning in order to achieve an unanimous decision in order to deny that resistance any purchase. If Warren had to achieve his precious 9-0 decision by resting it on psychological contortions, rather than natural rights and the Constitution, then so be it.
The second is that since racial segregation was wrong in the negative effects that it had on black children, it is conceivable that another case of “separate but equal” could be decided differently if it could be proven to have positive effects.
That second reason is not as far-fetched as it sounds. During the BLM miasma the cultural-Marxist idea of “white supremacy” entered the mainstream vernacular; remember the 2021 California recall election when Larry Elder was called the black face of white supremacy. This is the idea that American institutions are implicitly rigged in favor of maintaining white power, leaving blacks to create their own alternatives.
This is what Benjamin and Noah refer to when they discuss “integration” into a “supremacist culture” and the comfort level blacks (or as Noah pointed out in the podcast, individual members of all ethnic and racial groups) have with one another.
You see the ideological foundations for racially-segregated schools. It is conceivable that a group of black racists could bring a case one day for publicly-funded all-black schools, citing the contingent Brown and beneficial effect of such schools on black children.
Far-fetched? Well it’s not going to happen any time soon given the current retreat of DEI and racial set-asides in general, as well as the current composition of the Court. However, as the first Trump administration showed with its three Supreme Court picks, things can change rapidly, and by 2029 three Republican justices will be 74-years old or older. How would a Court newly restocked by a Democrat with two to three more Ketanji Brown Jacksons rule?
Time to get another case in front of the Court and get this corrected while we still have Alito and Thomas there.
“It is conceivable that a group pf black racists could bring a case one day for publicly-funded all-black schools …”
Don’t some of the Ivy League schools [sic] have racially-segregated dormitories — at the request of certain non-white groups? It certainly seems like a concept that deserves legal scrutiny. If college age males & females (i.e. adults) who are old enough to be conscripted to go & die in the Ukraine believe they will perform better with racially segregated living spaces, then would the same apply to their academic performance at younger ages?
He comes from south africa where they have set about confiscating white farmers land leading to a zimbabwe like famine
You might want an antecedent there, Miguel. Who is ‘he?”
Trevor noah he makes a big deal about apartheid which ended thirty years ago
There was a a lot of chit-chat after the election how podcasts, especially Joe Rogan, were the new heavy hitter on the block when it came to elections.
There’s another angle to podcasts.
In many ways they are the complement to Twitter – whereas Twitter provides short bursts with any “conversation” done asynchronously, podcasts provide a long format with synchronous conversations. On Twitter you can do a drive-by on a topic , but it’s short and you don’t have to elaborate because you’re not sitting across a table from someone. The Joe Rogan, long-format podcast is a three-hour long conversation where you (and not your social media intern) have to stay in there past the cliches and one-liners and Joe’s going to ask follow-ups.
Rogan is probably as close as we are going to get in popular culture to a Socratic dialogue. Well maybe a cross between a dialogue and a police interrogation. Rogan is there, it’s comfortable, he’s going to get you talking and there will be nowhere to hide over 3 hours.
Now the Trevor Noahs of the world and podcasts?
Everyone these days seems to have a podcast. Clearly a media advisor put a bug in Noah’s ear and with a small crew – producer, booking agent, research intern – and some tech off you go. It’s not hard to get started and that low threshold should be a warning sign. It took a little bit of time for people to get the hang of Twitter, it will be the same with podcasts.
The problem with a Trevor Noah podcast is that he is trying for a long version of the Daily Show, 40 minutes to an hour with guests and as a poseur he doesn’t have the horsepower to pull it off with some of them. The Sam Altman one was at best banal. The big problem occurs with a radical nut like Ruha Benjamin Noah falls into a reverse-Rogan in that he’s the one spilling the beans, going places as a supposed. “truth-teller” that he shouldn’t go. His comment that Finland has the best schools because they are all homogeneous and his follow-up comments with Benjamin leaves the listener with the only possible conclusion, that specifically black and white kids cannot learn in the same classroom and that maybe we should all have our own play pens. I thought diversity is our strength. He should be forced to justify that racist comment for the next 10 years
As a wise man once said, a man has got to know his limitations and Noah doesn’t know his.
Note about Noah. He makes a comment that he feels more comfortable around blacks, even Africans. Well that would make sense given he is from Africa (you can tell he is past the 5 minute mark of the interview and is flailing), but ummm…. I don’t think the view is reciprocated.
There are a lot of media personalities going to Substack and podcasts so they can extend their brand. They are going to find that they sound better with a professional editor and less than 5 minutes of air time, see Jen Rubin since she has left the Washington Post. Less is more.
A smart strategy would be someone like Turning Point to have a bunch of interns take the top 200 of these lefties doing brand extensions and start cataloging all the things they say.
Talk radio, as El Rushbo recreated it in the late 80s was (is) also long form, and liberals had a hard time getting that going as well.
What’s that tell you?
I’m starting to think segregation is a good idea. Not from the government, but from whatever minority wants it; black, brown, Asian, whatever.
Black students are the most disruptive to white students learning. I’m sure white students disturb Asian students in the classroom, too. I think twenty black kids sitting in a room together taught by a black teacher would probably learn a lot better than a racial mix, which frankly isn’t working right now. And can you imagine classrooms filled with only Asian kids, pushed forward by their parents and held to the highest standards by Asian teachers? We could be building cities on the Moon and Mars in 20 years.
Sooner or later, everyone discovers there’s a way you want to do things and there’s a way that works. The way our society wants to teach kids is not working, and race has a lot to do with it. If blacks want to try something different and it works, I say fine. And for other races who have had to contend with them, it’ll be addition by subtraction.
NEA and DoE are not helpful. NEA funds the D party, DoE adds, so far, a negative slant to the US education system, while wasting taxpayer dollars. Annd, employing a lot of people who will vote for a certain party to keep their jobs.
What a waste.
Thomas Sowell might be a good source for methods to improve education, perhaps for all racial groups.
in Wolfe’s last novel, Back to Blood, there are three stories, set in Miami, among the Cuban American community, among the African American and Creole, the last is that of a middle class academic and his young son, who ends up in the urban milieu, where he picks up the habits of the larger cohort, many 2nd generation immigrant youth forget the hard won lessons of their hard working parents, which the public schools do little tp impart,
You see a similar dynamic in the UK with the Rukabana (sic) the son of a Rwandan militia men, who had embraced islamist sympathies including Al Queda, leading to the Stockport massacre, the authorities knew of his tendencies and sought to hide them, scapegoating
angry citizens who had been witness to the Rochdale and Rotherdam scandals,
Mitchell brings up a good point which is under what circumstances or standards can people of different backgrounds share a common space or institutions? Say a neighborhood or a school? How much “diversity” can you have and still have a civic society?
That has always been an issue in the US, going back to the 18th Century with German immigration. There are ways of looking at it but in large part a sense of local control or subsidiarity, a community of communities or perhaps some other arrangement
What I am looking for is how much diversity one can have and still have a nation. The concept of nation is a subversive in the West and that goes a long way to stating why “MAGA” is triggering because it brings up the idea of a nation (America) that was once in its past great.
The Left of course disposes of the idea that “nation” has any legitimacy and keeps to looking to chop and dice the population into ever more identities, but in reality they too confront the idea upon what standards a civil society need exist – they just don’t tell anyone
Michael Barone 30+ years ago (very pre-Internet) had an essay describing the problems and processes various racial/ethnic groups had in integrating into American society. He placed blacks as 1964, post-Civil Rights Act – in a sense the resumption of their integration that halted in 1877. The problem was the timing because in the 1960s the consensus of whether America was a good thing worth integrating into had started to collapse and blacks were going to be used as leverage to discredit.
The biggest structural problem that the blacks face, more than issues of race, is that for the most part their elite bases their power on blacks’ aggrieved status. The Al Sharptons and Ruha Benjamins will be out of a job because their careers are based on defining blacks as victims and bargaining on their behalf. The last thing they need is an integrated successful class of blacks.
I’ll bring up one other part that touches on Mitchell’s argument which is that the traditional public K-12 school is collapsing, in part because it has become a sclerotic bureaucracy but also because it can no longer handle the strains put on it by a ideology that puts identity and a counter-social revolutionary strategy above all. It’s hard to have a community school when there is no community
I guess it’s because I’m from AZ but I am shocked when go to other states and see how schools are set up; large county based districts, tied to your local school building. An anecdote re: that mentality I have friends in Maryland who delayed the closing of their house for a week so they could claim as residence in a community that would allow them to enroll in a better elementary-middle-high school feeder system. Their permanent residence would be 8 miles down the road but they would be grandfathered in as their kids graduated from school to school.
The issues of CRT and Woke, as evidenced in the Loudoun County protests in 2021, and COVID were the straws that broke the back of the notion of the community K-12 school. Arizona for decades has had a strong system of cross-registration across and within district boundaries, charter schools, and now vouchers supporting private/parochial and home schooling.
As to Noah and Benjamin’s idea of getting black kids into their own schools so they will perform better… that’s what they have in Baltimore and despite that and that they spent $20,000+ per student and have entire schools where almost no one made proficiency.
Then again I don’t have a PhD like Benjamin, I just believe in empiricism
b
Back to Blood rang true because of my experience with the Broward County Schools, which have made me cynical about government policy, in general, the sons of hard working immigrants are infected with the culture of lethargy and nihilism, both here and across the pond,
To respond to Mike, let me say that I know it’s not merely racial mix that’s harming outcomes for students. Government schools face the problems Mike mentions and more. Unions, the devaluation of the education degree, teachers being predominantly women, the lack of belief in a good education (except for Asians), disincentive or refusal to teach the basics, students being viewed as walking piles of money, etc.
But if we’re not going to fix any of those things, allowing voluntary segregation could at least help somewhat. It would lessen disruption and allow time on task for some students, and create a better learning environment for students who have been causing the disruption.
I do agree with Mike that the last thing blacks want is a cohort of black kids who have good educations, get good jobs, and have no dependency on government. They are the apostates of black grievance.
Mitchell – One of the larger issues I have been involved with is school choice/vouchers, allowing parents to pick the schools and educational options for their kids whether it’s home schooling, cross-district registration, charters, That would seem to me to be the best test case regarding re-segregation
There are alot of theories that choice is racist, some of the studies point to post-Brown efforts by resisting Deep South states to use vouchers to escape integration
The Institute of Justice has published an article disputing that school choice is either racist in intent historically or that it produces such effects though I haven’t seen the primary data or methodology used.
If people like Benjamin were truly serious they would push for voucher programs like ESA in Arizona which allow for home schooling. Black families who want an “implicit trust” environment that Noah wants could pool their vouchers and create joint learning pods and other formats.
I am not aware any serious push by black activists to do this in any state, there may be and I’m not aware of it, but this is called putting the money where your mouth is. Of course that would spell death of the grievance industry
Really Benjamin, Noah, and the rest are not saying anything that many Christians have said for decades which is that the public school system is harmful to their values. They have pressed forward with home schooling without the support of vouchers.
Back when the kids were younger and they complained they couldn’t do what was asked I used what we called the “5 dollar rule” I asked them if I gave them 5 dollars (the amount varied) could they accomplish what I asked? if they said yes, then I told them their recalcitrance was a matter of motivation not ability.
If Benjamin and the rest were serious they would be going to Arizona and other states with vouchers and creating the racist educational nirvana they dream of
Mike–
If it seemed like I imputed noble goals to Benjamin, let me assure you of the opposite. My guess is that if she were able to set up any black-only schools, the main part of the curriculum for those children would be training on how to impose themselves on other races after graduation.
Mitchell – nah, I figured we were sampitico on the fact that Benjamin is ignoble. She has a problem that with integration and the easing of racial strife, she’s out of a job. Amazing what happens when you fund professorial positions like, along with DEI/HR, the problems “never” go away but seem to increase – and demand bigger budgets!
Along the lines of your first comment re: white students disturbing Asian students, when I talk with other parents about their kids and high school work to get to college, I always ask how they are spending their after school time.
Last November I stopped in my local library on a Saturday to grab a book.there were the Indian and east Asian kids working and I noticed a couple of what looked to be teenage girls who were white, they stood out because you never see people like that in a library
As I was leaving the library, the two girls came up to me and they were actually LDS missionaries, I know a number of the teams use the libraries for breaks but I didn’t realize they were in my area. We talked a bit, found out where they were from… The lesson is that yes there are different cultural styles when it comes to K-12 ed.